When I was twelve years old and you were seventeen the poet Ed Sanders tried to levitate the Pentagon by chanting. He had tons of help. Robert Lowell was there; Norman Mailer; Allen Ginsberg…and approximately ten thousand young and old people who were fed up with the military industrial complex. The crowd chanted the names of all the gods and goddesses they could think of. "Help us,Gods and Goddesses," they cried. They danced and wept and begged the divinities to spirit the Pentagon from the Earth. And they went home disappointed. And nowadays no one is singing or chanting in this country.
Citizens still protest, of course. There are websites. People occasionally march in the streets. But unless I am mistaken no one dresses in red feathers and calls on Hermes to turn the brutal engines of Capitalism into straw.
I hereby resolve to shake a homemade amulet and dance in a field of soybeans. I won’t worry about the neighbors. I have just enough irony to be sincere and winningly unscientific, which is to say, I remain philosophically hopeless, Confucian as always…
S.K.
Planet of the Blind 